“If Apple were to offer a scalable, high-density hardware solution, I would push hard for a platform switch,” said Patrick Gavin of the University of California at Santa Cruz Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering . “The PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to anything else out there in terms of power consumption versus processing power.”

It make sense that this point would come. Apple under the second coming of Steve Jobs has had a laserlike focus on the consumer and pro graphics markets. But they have other customer segments too. If nothing else, the reception that the guy demoing Mathematica at MacWorld got might convince them to pay attention to these genomics researchers. Then there’s the big BLAST story….

CNET: “Grid computing luring mainstream backers.” There’s something appealing about this: if a guy with solar panels in California can put energy back on the grid and get credit for it, why can’t we develop some generic, organized way to share spare CPU cycles? A draft paper by IBM and Globus describes how this may mesh with web services.

Of course, Lisa told me about grid computing in September, but I’m just now picking up on it. &lt;Insert wry joke about husbands not listening to wives here.>more…

Check this out: Oliver’s crossPost Plug-In. “This simple Plug-In installs XML-RPC handlers to post news items to a Manila site and retrieve a department list of that site.” My question: how does this compare to calling newsItem.create in the standard Manila API?more…